Wednesday, December 16, 2009

electronic readers

Grace suggested buying a book for a holiday book (see below) and that got me thinking... There's Amazon's Kindle, the Sony Reader, and now BN's Nook. I don't know much about any of them but Sony's looks the prettiest. The Nook is the first one to have color on the bottom. But what about color pages? If that happens will kids' book find their way into the electronic readers? How scary! At least I think so. I don't have any desire to have one. I like holding a book, being able to flip its pages, and I like them on my bookshelves. I collect art books and I don't see them ever being replaced. If I read a lot of manuscripts then I wouldn't want to lug them around and I could then see a use for a electronic reader. But otherwise no. What would happen to picture books if people started reading them on those things? All the magic would be gone.

8 comments:

The couple times I've had a peek at various readers I was surprised that they were a lot nicer than I expected... not as much like a computer screen as I would have thought. But still, I think I will always prefer paper.

With kids books its hard to tell what will happen- its so much harder to imagine the experience of reading a picture book to a kid translating very well into electronic media!

I saw Sherman Alexie on The Colbert Report a couple of weeks ago. He doesn't allow any of his books to be put on Kindle or any digital book format. He talked about the pirating of books and the loss of local appreciation for books. It was an interesting discussion.

I'm with you, Meghan -- I love books: not just the words but the smells and the colors and the paper and the typeface and turhning the pages. With ebooks, there's that annoying blip of black every time you want to go to the next page, so you're always interrupted -- and you never get to that state of forgetting that you're reading and feeling IN the story. Admittedly, that only happens to me when I'm reading a really really good book but with an ebook I don't think it would ever happen at all, and that would be sad.

Also with ebooks everything will look the same -- same size, same format, even if the typeface is different.

You won't be able to flip through the pages -- I know, you can browse, but it's not the same. It goes at the ereader's pace, not mine-- and right now, books are the only art form that I can experience completely at my own pace. I like that.

I can't see pic books translating well to the kindles and the like. At least not in the same format they are printed in now. First of all, there could be no illustration spreads (unless they made a special PB reader that was the size of a laptop.To get the picture quality of art printed on paper, the ram in the electronic readers would have to be vast, compared to the ones that hold text only.I suppose baby board books would work, small images, one image per page but most of the attraction of those first books to a baby is feeling it, turning the pages and chewing on it, ACK, who wants to yell at their baby all the way through the story saying, no, don't touch, don't drool all over the screen:)

I actually had my youngest grandchild (number 6) over this afternoon. She loves books but the ones that are textile are the most attactive to her. To most young one I would assume.They have yet to come up with a "touch and feel" monitor, so I do not fear technology yet, when it comes to pic books for the young:)

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